Posts tagged with: catholic social teaching

Trending at today’s Aleteia, Michael Matheson Miller discusses Pope Francis and his call to social justice. Miller asks the question, “Do orthodoxy and social justice have to be mutually exclusive?” Miller says there is a “pervasive, false dichotomy between theological doctrine and social justice that has dominated much of Catholic thought and preaching since the 1960s.”

Intrigued by the precedent that Pope Francis is setting in this area, Miller says,

From his first moments as pope, Francis has urged Christians to come out of ourselves and engage the poor. “The place for Christ is in the streets,” he said. He warned against the indifference of the rich man to the suffering of Lazarus. As he writes in Evangelii Gaudium,

“Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.” (54) (more…)

There is no reason to assume that the preferential option for the poor is somehow a preferential option for big government, says Acton research director Samuel Gregg. Gregg writes that lifting people out of poverty — and not just material poverty but also moral and spiritual poverty — does not necessarily mean that the most effective action is to implement yet another welfare program:

What does living out the option for the poor mean in practice? We must engage in works of charity — those activities that often address specific dimensions of poverty in ways that no state program ever could. And this means giving of our time, energy, and human and monetary capital in ways that bring Christ’s light into some of the darkest places on earth.

Yet this does not mean that Catholics are required to give something to everything, or even that Catholics must give away everything they own. As Fr. James Schall, SJ, writes, “If we take all the existing world wealth and simply distribute it, what would happen? It would quickly disappear; all would be poor.” Put another way, living out the option for the poor may well involve those people with a talent for creating wealth doing precisely that.

On Monday afternoon, Acton Institute President Rev. Robert A. Sirico was a guest on “Faith, Culture, Politics: In That Order” on the Guadalupe Radio Network, which broadcasts primarily in Texas. Rev. Sirico engaged in an extended discussion of Catholic Social Teaching, with a great deal of time dedicated to Pope Francis’ particular style and emphasis in dealing with some of the more controversial matters of our time. You can listen to the interview via the audio player below.

Update: The embedded audio appears to be having problems; you can go to the Soundcloud page for the interview by clicking this link.

The pope is emphasizing “human solidarity,” Sirico said. “He quoted Benedict by saying that globalization has brought us to be close, to be neighbors, but not to be brothers.” Achieving a sense of fraternity is the goal.

Last night, Acton Institute President Rev. Robert A. Sirico joined host Lawrence Kudlow and author Naomi Schaefer Riley on The Kudlow Report to discuss the selection of Pope Francis as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, the effect he is having on the Catholic Church worldwide, and his views on economics and free markets. We’ve embedded the video of the interview from CNBC below.

Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg has been busy on the interview circuit over the past few days as news organizations look for intelligent analysis of Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation that that was released last week. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal called upon Gregg to provide his thoughts on the economic content in the exhortation on Opinion Journal Live; we’ve embedded the video below.